Turkey's internet law contains a provision, Article 8/A, built for genuine emergencies: an imminent threat to life, a public-health crisis, an active national-security incident. It lets a small circle of officials order a website blocked within four hours, before a judge ever sees the case. That is a defensible tool in the narrow circumstances it was written for. The İFÖD (Freedom of Expression Association) report published June 26, 2026 documents what it has become instead: the legal basis of choice for suppressing corruption reporting, protest coverage and opposition-linked content, deployed at a scale and frequency that no longer resembles an emergency power at all.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
According to İFÖD's EngelliWeb 2025 report, Turkish courts and state institutions had blocked 1,505,484 websites and domain names cumulatively by the end of 2025, through more than 1.28 million separate decisions issued by 875 different institutions and courts — with 232,000 of those blocks added in 2025 alone (Stockholm Center for Freedom).
Article 8/A specifically is the fastest-growing category. Decisions issued under it rose from 71 in 2024 to 179 in 2025 — a 2.5x increase — but the number of internet addresses those decisions actually targeted jumped from 828 to 6,300, nearly eightfold (Stockholm Center for Freedom). Each order is now blocking, on average, far more addresses than it did a year earlier — evidence that the provision is being used for broad sweeps rather than the narrowly tailored, single-incident response its "imminent danger" language implies.
The report ties much of that growth to a specific event: the March 2025 detention and imprisonment of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, after which access to X, YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp was throttled nationwide for roughly 42 hours, and subsequent measures targeted the accounts of student groups, women's organizations, journalists and opposition figures (Nordic Monitor). The Interior Ministry separately examined 257,481 social media accounts in 2025, up roughly 30% from 2024, and expanded VPN blocking to 454 server addresses across 26 services — undercutting the main workaround ordinary users had relied on (Stockholm Center for Freedom).
Steelmanning the National-Security Rationale
It's worth stating the government's strongest case plainly, because it isn't frivolous. Turkey sits in a genuinely difficult security environment — a long-running PKK conflict, cross-border spillover from Syria, and a history of coordinated online mobilization around real unrest. Law No. 5651's Article 8/A, which authorizes the President or relevant ministries to order blocking in cases of "imminent danger of delay" tied to national security, public order, crime prevention or public health, was written with the reasonable premise that some threats move faster than an ordinary court docket (Law No. 5651, Article 8/A). Democracies elsewhere — including the US and EU member states — retain some form of expedited emergency-content authority for genuinely time-critical harms, and a state that ignored a live coordination channel for violence because a judge's calendar was full would be failing a real duty.
Where the Justification Breaks Down
The steelman only holds if the power stays rare and reviewable. İFÖD's numbers show neither. A provision invoked 71 times in 2024 and 179 times in 2025, covering thousands of addresses tied to corruption allegations and protest coverage rather than active-threat content, is not functioning as an emergency valve — it is functioning as a standing censorship channel that happens to route around ordinary judicial review. The report's own examples — bandwidth throttling of major platforms for nearly two days after a political detention, blocks reaching student groups and rights advocates rather than anyone plausibly tied to an imminent security threat — describe political content suppression, not crisis management.
The accountability mechanism that should catch this abuse is also visibly failing. Turkey's Constitutional Court has already found parts of the broader blocking framework unconstitutional: its October 11, 2023 ruling (E.2020/76, K.2023/172) struck down Article 9's takedown-notification regime and part of Article 8's removal powers as disproportionate interferences with expression, though Article 8/A itself survived that ruling intact (Gün + Partners). İFÖD documents a further problem on top of that: even where the Constitutional Court has separately found individual blocking decisions violated free expression, lower courts have repeatedly failed to lift the underlying restrictions. A right without a remedy that gets enforced is not really a right.
What Proportionate Would Look Like
None of this requires abolishing emergency blocking outright. A defensible version of Article 8/A would sunset each order automatically after a short, fixed window absent judicial confirmation; publish aggregate usage statistics the way BTK already does for catalog-crime blocking under Article 8 (BTK); and exclude ordinary news reporting and corruption allegations from the national-security category entirely, since neither plausibly creates the kind of harm the four-hour emergency track was designed to stop. Turkey does not need to choose between security and an open internet — but on the current trajectory, it has stopped even pretending to try.